1. Field of the Invention
The invention which is the subject of this application relates to a system and method for the provision of data which can be used in the management and development of an organisation to which the data relates.
2. Prior Art
The provision of data management and use systems is well known. A use of this type of system is to allow the user of the system to be able to access the data in a managed way in order for answers to specific queries to be obtained. In many cases the organisations using the systems and methods require answers to questions which can be at a strategic level. Typically, these high value decisions in businesses are made by working with, trading, and/or balancing concepts that don't appear in the raw data of the organisation. However, the conventional systems and methods do not provide data which is representative, or an accurate reflection, of these concepts of the organisation. For example, decision making in relation to issues such as ‘defence capability’, ‘contract’, ‘service’, ‘budget’ are the units of reasoning at senior levels in the military whereas the raw data is at the lower level relating to lines of development that contribute to these issues, not at the level of the issues themselves.
Conventionally, the known systems are capable of accessing a series of databases which include raw data relevant to the organisation. When a specific request for information is raised the system will sift through the raw data in a managed manner and attempt to identify the data which is relevant to the request and then analyse that raw data to try and provide some form of meaningful answer to the request. Thus, the current methods and systems which are provided to support decision making do typically aggregate and analyse business data sourced from business systems but the sources and types of data which are used is not that which is required and/or most relevant to the decision making processes which are typically required to be made at relatively high levels.
A further problem is that as the conventional method and systems rely on data only, considerable time, personnel and expenditure has to be committed to assembling and populating the data resources that are to be used, especially at the implementation stage of the system or method. Typically a data “warehouse” is created initially but this takes time and also is required to be regularly updated such that, in practice, it is found that the conventional systems and methods tend to lag behind real time. A significant amount of processing capability is required to be built into the system which adds to the expense of implementing the same, and it also means that even when the system or method is used to provide an answer, by the time the answer is provided, it may no longer be relevant or pertinent to the real time situation, which may have changed since the question was raised of the system or method.
A yet further problem is that in many conventional systems and methods it is possible that the data which is required for an accurate answer to be generated is not available or is not sufficiently identified for it be referred or be understood to be relevant to the question which has been asked. Yet further, the known systems and methods often have no ordered way of taking into account other aspects of the organisation or the environment external to the organisation, which may have an impact on the answer which is given to the request, and as a result of this, the answer which is given may not be as accurate as desired.
As a result, the conventional methods and systems do not provide the level of support to the decision making process that is required and when one considers that decision making in organisations can be at an investment level, the current approach of attempting to support that decision making process through using the “language of data” by analysis of operational data is not effective or useful. This is because the conventional systems and methods comprises looking at the data that a system, organisation, or community generates and analyses and presenting this to inform decisions rather than providing an answer which is in the language of the organisation posing the question of the models or systems.